


Young Man and the Sea

by Sholio



Category: White Collar
Genre: Fake Character Death, Gen, Pre-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-09-22
Updated: 2012-09-22
Packaged: 2017-11-14 20:24:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,518
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/519181
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sholio/pseuds/Sholio
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>For <a href="http://collarcorner.livejournal.com/18638.html?thread=604110#t604110">a prompt</a> by Soteriophobe at CollarCorner. Pre-series, contains a very mild spoiler for 4x10. Some deaths are more convenient than tragic.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Young Man and the Sea

It was Agent Sanderson who told him. Peter had never liked Sanderson all that much, and this just confirmed that Sanderson was never, ever going to receive an invitation to join Peter's fledgling White Collar task force.

"Hey, Burke," Sanderson said as Peter came through the swinging glass doors, briefcase in one hand and paper cup of coffee in the other. "Heard the news? I guess you can get back to chasing shady mortgage lenders."

Peter rolled his eyes and headed for the stairs to his office. "What are you talking about, Jeff?"

"Caffrey." Sanderson swung around from his desk, looking smug. "Word came in late last night from the Frisco office. He's dead."

Peter stopped with one foot poised above the bottom stair. For a moment he thought he must have misheard. "He's what?"

"Dead," Sanderson said, stretching and leaning back in his chair. "Tried to knock over a cruise ship, got nailed by a great white as he was swimming to his getaway boat. Hardly enough left to put in a shoebox by the time the Coast Guard fished him out." His tone was one of almost lascivious fascination, like a man describing a favorite scene from a horror movie -- compulsion and voyeuristic glee, mixed with a little guilt.

"That's a human life you're talking about," Peter snapped, and went up to his office. A single sip of his coffee turned his stomach; he dropped the cup in the trash.

He had the documents faxed over from the San Francisco field office. One of the probies collated them in a folder and dropped it on his desk. Peter had to stare at it for a long time before he could bring himself to open it and read the details.

It was surprise, mostly, he told himself. He'd been after "James Bonds" for so long that the idea of not chasing him anymore was disconcerting ... like the world had come slightly unbalanced on its axis. And especially having it end like this. He'd actually been looking at flights to California just a few days ago. The San Francisco office had gathered some good intel on Caffrey, and they thought they had him in their cross-hairs. If there was going to be a takedown, Peter had wanted to be there for it.

And now this. Mauled to death by sharks. That was such a Caffrey-esque way to go. Peter couldn't help smiling, in spite of the odd hollow feeling twisting his stomach. It was tragic and terrible, Caffrey's promising young life cut short in such a brutal fashion, and yet ... somewhere, Caffrey must be laughing himself. If Neal Caffrey had planned his own death scene, this was exactly the sort of dramatic death that he would probably have wanted.

In fact ... Peter's eyes narrowed. A little _too_ dramatic, perhaps? What were the odds of such a spectacular death under normal circumstances? People _did_ get fatally mauled by sharks; it wasn't impossible. But it was definitely unlikely. The sort of death that made an impression, not a stupid, ordinary death like getting hit by a car in rush-hour traffic.

Peter flipped through the file. It was stomach-churning reading, and he was glad he hadn't had lunch yet. But it was also a trifle ... convenient. The FBI had been closing on Neal, and then, just as the warrants were being gathered for an arrest, he'd died in a particularly spectacular fashion. The coroner's report left no doubt of either the corpse's identity or the fact that he was very, very dead. The sole witness, identified as M. Santiago, was a Coast Guard auxiliary volunteer, also the same person who'd retrieved Caffrey's remains from the water. No one else had seen what had happened; no one else had handled the remains, except for the coroner.

All the paperwork seemed to be in order. Maybe it was just that he couldn't let it go. ( _Burke the Archaeologist_ , they'd called him in his probie days, _because he can't stop digging._ ) 

And yet. He couldn't bring himself to believe it. Maybe he just didn't want to.

 

***

 

"Found anything?" El asked him, sliding an open beer across the table.

"Mmm." Peter took it absently. He'd spent most of the day working on other cases, unavoidably, but he had also taken the time to collect as much information as he could: everything from the San Francisco office's reports on Caffrey's movements over the past couple of weeks, to printouts of a decade's worth of articles about shark attacks along the California coast. He'd attempted to contact the mysterious M. Santiago, but the phone number in the FBI files turned out to belong to a Santa Cruz marina. Lots of people lived on their boats; still, every additional detail that he discovered kept his alarm bells jangling.

"There's something I'm not seeing, El. I know it."

"Maybe it's just that you don't know how to stop chasing him," El said gently, kissing his cheek before returning to her own work. "Even now that he's gone."

Hearing the cold facts stated in El's soft voice somehow cut even deeper than it had in Sanderson's smug drawl. There was just something fundamentally _wrong_ about a universe that would snuff out such a bright young life. Neal Caffrey, with his cleverness and sense of humor and love of living -- all the qualities about him that made him such a pain in the butt to chase were exactly the things that made it hard for Peter to believe he was dead. Stupid, he knew; intelligent, likable young people died all the time. And yet. Deep down, he just couldn't believe it.

Because he was missing something obvious. He knew it. Something about the witness kept nagging at him. Some detail that was almost falling into place, but not quite.

And then it dropped. Peter jumped out of his chair so suddenly that he almost spilled his beer.

"Santiago. It's the name of the main character in _The Old Man and the Sea._ "

El looked up from her laptop. "It's not _that_ uncommon a name. Especially in California, I'd imagine."

But it was a little too much of a coincidence. And it was exactly the sort of inside joke that Neal would use to thumb his nose at the authorities. The kid never had been able to resist that kind of thing. It was why Peter had a green sucker in his top desk drawer, and it was also why they kept almost catching him (but not quite, not yet).

Peter pulled out his phone.

"Who are you calling?" El asked.

"The coroner's office in Santa Cruz County."

Since the West Coast was three hours earlier, business hours hadn't ended yet. After being shuffled around from department to department, Peter managed to locate the supervisor of the coroner who'd signed off on Caffrey's autopsy report, and found exactly what he expected to find: that the man had been suspected in the past of taking bribes (though nothing had ever been proven). Next, Peter called the switchboard at the San Francisco FBI office and got himself transfered to an old Quantico buddy who worked out there. "Larry, you know that favor you owe me? There's something I want you to do."

When he described what he wanted, Larry laughed. "That's it?"

"That's it, as long as you do it right now."

Peter hung up and gave El a triumphant look, as a wild, unexpected surge of joy welled up in his chest.

"You look happy," Elizabeth said, smiling.

"I'll be happier when Larry calls me back."

It was almost half an hour before his phone rang. "So I did what you asked," Larry said. "Drove by the marina and checked on the slip you mentioned."

It was the slip number that had been given as M. Santiago's current address. "And?" Peter said.

"There's a sailboat called the _Lucky Lady._ Belongs to some stockbroker who takes it out on vacations and weekends. Apparently he's been renting it for years. He had it out yesterday --"

"And yesterday was when the FBI interviewed our friend M. Santiago." Peter laughed; he couldn't help it. "Thanks, Lar. I'd say I owe _you_ one now."

"You seem awfully cheerful for a man who just found out that a case you'd thought was closed is open again," El said teasingly as he hung up.

"Yeah, but hon, I don't want it to end like that. Caffrey's _good._ Maybe the best I've ever come across. I want to catch him fair and square, not lose him to a stupid accident."

El laughed. "Sometimes when you talk about Neal, it sounds more like you're talking about a friend than a criminal."

Peter barely heard her. He scraped together the printouts and faxes on the table, thought about tossing them, then dumped them all into a file labeled "CAFFREY - SHARK". It would remind him to look twice the _next_ time a report of Neal's death crossed his desk (and he had a strong suspicion there would be a next time).

The hunt was back on. And he couldn't believe how good it felt.


End file.
